Beauty, Mercy, Justice

“Writing” Icons?

It has always bothered me when people insist that icons are “written”, not painted. I understand the logic: icons are a word of God in line and color. And one needs a certain knowledge of symbolic language to “read” them. But this insistence has always seemed wrongheaded; I always pointed out to my students that if icons are “written” they are written in paint, and thus “painting icons” is perfectly acceptable. And it bothered me because this judgement is usually rendered with a sense of superiority, as if the advocate of “written” icons is somehow privy to some sort of arcane knowledge.

There is quite the discussion of the subject on the Orthodox Arts Journal site, with both sides of the thing presenting their arguments; scroll down a bit and there are three posts on the subject: http://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/:

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5 Responses

Thanks for this. There is the noble cause of defending the Orthodox tradition in the Catholic Church – commonly called Greek Catholicism – from all the latinizations it’s done to itself. (“You don’t have to put up statues to prove you’re Catholic. In fact Rome says not to.”) And then there’s obnoxious anti-Western affectation. “Writing” icons strikes me as the latter. Making up differences to worsen the schism.

Tangent: another peeve is icons by well-meaning Roman Riters who don’t understand iconography. The late Archimandrite Serge (Keleher) brought that up at least once.

Do you follow the “Icons and Their Interpretation” blog? http://russianicons.wordpress.com/ He is a nonreligious scholar of icons who seems to delight in deflating precious myths like this one. According to him the Russian word for “paint” is the same as the word for “write”, and that’s the whole of it. With a lot of these “precious myths” though, there may be spiritual truth that is more important than the historic or linguistic or scientific truth. It may be wrong to insist didactically that ‘we don’t paint icons, we write them.’ But it may be good say ‘we think of it more as writing than painting because we are making a symbol of religious truth rather than a peice of art to be appreciated aesthetically.

English has three words where Greek has one. Graphein can mean to “write”, to “draw” or to “paint”. My faughter is an ikonographer in Greece, and she paints them, she doesn’t “write” them. And since someone asked about the best site for ikons for sale, you could have a look at hers here: Ikonographics – Home

Oh yes, in case you were wondering, I spell it “ikon” and not “icon”. The former are found in church, the latter on computer screens and celebrity magazines.